Sewage in Thames too much for Olympic rower

Photo: PAUL FARMER

A British gold medal Olympic rower reportedly has stopped training on the Thames River, Britain’s most famous water, and the reason may surprise you. The river has too much raw sewage in it.

The rower, Andy Triggs Hodge, gave up on the Thames after a sewage overflow for which the local water utility has apologized.

The River Thames flows through southern England.Even without the overflow, however, the Thames is pretty much a stink hole during the summer, according to this Bloomberg article. At least 30 million tons of excrement and waste spill into the Thames every year.

“The effects on our health became a major concern,” Triggs Hodge told Bloomberg, explaining why he relocated to Reading, England.

In One 30 Second Commercial, NASCAR Identifies Six Ways the Sport is Green

Did you know that NASCAR pace cars are electric vehicles? Did you know that a NASCAR track is solar powered, and that the racing cars are equipped to use corn-based biofuel? NASCAR also recycles and buys carbon offsets. That’s six ways in all. Not bad for a sport that once was synonymous with puffs of tailpipe smoke. Learn more about NASCAR’s green programs at http://green.nascar.com.

Would you Cut Down Trees to Expand Town’s Athletic Fields?

An environmental group has gone to court to prevent the New Jersey community of Bernardsville from cutting down a couple hundred trees in order to expand the school district’s athletic fields.

The group, called Active Citizens for Responsible Sustainability, or ACRES, is challenging the expansion in part because the area that would lose the trees is a wetlands and habitat for threatened or endangered species.

The group objected on other, more legal reasons, but let’s keep this simple.

Earth Preservers wants to know whether, if you lived in Bernardsville, NJ, would you support or oppose a plan to cut down a couple hundred trees in order to expand school athletic fields?

View poll on GoPollGo

Runners in Paris Marathon Became One Big Electrical Power Plant

Ever heard of piezoelectric energy? That’s the energy produced when people move.

In Paris this month, some 40,000 competitors in the Paris Marathon ran over tiles laid out on a street. The tiles vibrated, collecting piezoelectric energy that got fed by wires back to an electrical storage battery, an example of a process scientists refer to as energy harvesting.

The electricity from the battery was used to power signs along the route.

Stop to think: piezoelectric energy may be the most environmentally-friendly source of electricity of all, right?

To learn more, read this Climate Progress story.

London May Have Cheated to Keep Olympic Pollution Levels Down

Cheating the sort of thing that gets an Olympian sent home in disgrace. But what if the alleged cheater is the home of the Olympics?

London hosted the 2012 Olympics, which was hailed as the “greenest” Olympics ever held.

But now London and it mayor have been accused of cheating to artificially keep pollution levels down during the 2012 Olympic Games. A number of environmental groups claim that London Mayor Boris Johnson applied a sticky glue to the streets of London during the Games. The glue allegedly kept a lot of dust from getting into the air.

While this sound like much ado about nothing, if the European Union finds that the environmentalists’ charge is accurate, London may have to pay a hefty fine.

To learn more, read this story from Britain’s Telegraph.